“The doctor, then; will he be here?”
“Oh yes, my lord, and soon.”
He left the tent, and I lay thinking again, ready to quarrel with everything, for my arm pained me, and my head felt stiff and sore.
“I wish he’d speak in a plain, matter-of-fact way,” I grumbled to myself. “I’m sick of being ‘my lorded’ and bowed down to. I always feel as if I could kick a fellow over when he bows down to me as if I were one of their precious idols.”
Then I laughed to myself long and heartily, for I knew that I must be getting better by my irritable ways. And now I forced myself into thinking about our position as English rulers of the land, and wondered whether it would be possible for our power to be overthrown. Then came on a feverish desire to know where Brace was, and in what kind of condition his men were, and those of the colonel.
“It seems hard that they do not come and try to rescue me,” I thought. “Brace would come fast enough,” I added spitefully, “if I were a gun.”
This idea seemed so comic in its disagreeable tone, and so thoroughly due to my state of weakness and unreason, that I laughed silently.
“How precious ill-tempered I am!” I said to myself.
A moment later I was wondering about the fate of those dear to me at Nussoor—whether my father was still there, and whether there had been any rising in his neighbourhood.
Directly after I came to the conclusion that his regiment would certainly have been called away, and I hoped that he had made arrangements for my mother and sister to go back to England; and then I was marvelling at the rapid way in which my thoughts ran excitedly from one subject to the other.